Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews from a writer who himself is an accomplished fiction writer? In Inner Workings, J.M.Coetzee analyzes and penetrates few of the literary work by others and through his own voice, gives detailed reviews, explain nuances of work from his, sometimes, detached lens of understanding. In an essay on V.S.Naipaul he explains:
One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realization that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself- himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.
